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When Formula 1 superstar Lewis Hamilton announced in December that he would be leaving the Mercedes team for Ferrari after 246 Grands Prix, 84 victories, and 6 drivers championships in 12 seasons, much of the focus was on Hamilton’s future plans. Just as compelling was the empty seat Hamilton was leaving at Mercedes. His departure triggered an intense internal process for the automakerthe search for a successor. Many of the discussions and debates that resulted in Mercedes choosing young Italian driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli played out over messaging app WhatsApp. That process is now the subject of a new one-hour documentary on Netflix called The Seat, dropping on May 5. Directed by Kyle Thrash, and produced by RadicalMedia, its also a WhatsApp commercial. The Meta-owned app is a producer, and created the project with its content partner Modern Arts. WhatsApps global head of marketing, Vivian Odior, says the company decided to create the doc in order to fully show how the app is often part of critical inflection points in its users lives. When it comes to telling those stories, we believe in giving the space to properly unpack the role we play and share the full story of our user base, says Odior. We dont believe we should be limited by ad formats. Storytelling allows us to occupy a unique position in the hearts of users and pushes beyond the functional role we play. This isnt some ad-tiered piece of content. Its a legitimate addition to the streamers F1 library. Many marketers will be shaking with jealousy or excitement, inspired to make their own move into entertainment. But be forewarned, creating content that can go head-to-head with other films and TV is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for those searching for a formula. Even WhatsApp knows this is a unique brand opportunity. Make your own luck WhatsApp has long been a brand partner to the Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team, and last year Modern Arts created a short film on Hamilton called Push Push. It chronicled the ups and downs of his racing career, as well as his personal struggles with dyslexia and bullying, woven into a conversation he has with a group of teens today about their own lives. That helped build the relationship and trust with Mercedes to make The Seat possible. Modern Arts has a track record of telling compelling stories around the platform, like its award-winning, 26-minute doc We Are Ayenda, about WhatsApps role in helping the Afghanistan Womens Youth National Football Team escape the Taliban. Zac Ryder, the agency’s cofounder and co-chief creative officer, says that made it a lot easier to start figuring out a story to be told around privacy with the Mercedes team. It just so happens that not only is WhatsApp a sponsor of the team, but the entire Mercedes team literally runs on WhatsApp, Ryder says. You very rarely ever send an email. It’s all done on WhatsApp. They have hundreds of WhatsApp groups, and that’s how their entire team is organized, from little details around traveling to big things like engineering and car designs. It’s all shared across WhatsApp. In theory, this sounds like a formula for the greatest product demo video ever made. But Formula 1 teams are known to be about as forthcoming with secrets as the Pentagon. Ryder says Mercedes saw the value in giving the film access to its internal process, with the goal of helping F1 fans fall in love with Antonelli, a relatively unknown 18-year-old driver. For WhatsApp, the goal was to tell a privacy story by showing how well it functions in high-stakes situations. Our job was to figure out how those two things can coexist to make something that was going to be compelling, Ryder says. No one formula Its a unique situation for a brand to have its product at the center of a major sports story. Ryder says the strategy quickly became to make the project revolve around trust. The Mercedes team was trusting its F1 drivers seat to Antonelli, but in the process it was also showing its trust in WhatsApp as a communications platform. In a typical commercial edit, marketers will obsess over how many times the product is mentioned, or the product appears, or the logo is flashed. Modern Arts CEO Brooke Stites says the film is not about that because the brand and its product are so intertwined with the story itself. As a marketing investment, Stites says the film cost about as much as it would to make and buy ad time for a 60-second commercial. Here, the entire budget went into the production because being on Netflix means there isnt the need to pay for advertising space on TV and online. It’s a totally different model, says Stites. It’s not cheap, but it’s what you’re going to spend on a 60-second spot that you then have to spend 10 times more to buy places that force people to watch it. Everyone who watches F1 content on Netflix is going to get served our film. The Seat is not a paid advertising arrangement with Netflix; it was acquired by the streamer in the same way other film and television content is acquired. Other major streamers were vying for the film, but Netflix’s connection to the long-running docuseries Formula 1: Drive to Survive made it the ideal home. For some time brands and ad agencies have been putting make a film for Netflix in their marketing briefs, but the reality is, its not that simple. Stites says there are some critical ingredients a project needs in order to get anywhere near Netflix or any other top-tier streamer. You have to have an amazing story and quality of craft, she says. All these streamers are looking at it and asking, Is this something that’s adding value to my audience? Is this something that my viewers are going to actually want to engage with? That was a big part of the F1 piece. For other brands interested in this type of storytelling, Stites has a piece of advice: Tell a compelling story that involves your brand, dont just tell your brand story. Every brand wants to tap into culture. To tell stories people really want to hear, you need to find the stories in culture that authentically include your brand instead of trying to force-feed your brand into culture. We’re not telling a story about WhatsApp. It’s not about the brand, says Stites. Stories involving brands already exist in culture that are really actually very interesting, and people are willing and wanting to engage with them. Tell a story that people are going to care about, versus starting from a place of Le’s tell a brand story.
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E-Commerce
A new partnership between music creation platform BandLab and Sony is set to bring users production tools that are aimed at making independent musicians competitive with big-budget artists. Starting this summer, BandLab will integrate Sonys spatial sound technology, 360 Reality Audio, directly into its song-creation appallowing the songwriters and producers who use it to build immersive songs on their smartphones, using any headphones. A lot of these creators dont have access to expensive equipment and gear, says Jordy Freed, who leads brand, business development and strategy for Sonys personal entertainment business. When we look at 360 [Reality Audio] and some of the other technologies well integrate, wed be doing a disservice to current and future trends of music creation and listening if we didn’t open this up to more people. Executives from both companies say the features that BandLab will add in the coming months are just the start of a broader partnership that positions Sony and its personal entertainment businesswhich encompasses its consumer and professional audio businessesas a ground-floor partner to BandLab’s 100 millionstrong user base. Making amateur production immersive During the production process for most songs, producers and musicians assign elementsvocals and instruments, for exampleto a channel (left or right in the most basic form). With spatial sound tools offered by companies such as Sony and Dolby Atmos, song-makers can assign any element, or object, a position and volume based on distance in a virtual sphere around a listeners head. Though Apples spatial audio on Apple Music can be paired with hardware capabilities like head tracking to create a more dynamic spatial experience, a listener doesnt always need special headphones to listen to an immersive song. But the tools for making immersive music have been reserved for pricier software suites and studio equipment. For many years, its been so limiting for who can create in spatial, just from a pure economic basis, Freed says. A lot of the tools that have existed in spatial are often on the higher end in terms of price points and knowledge needed to use them. If youre an emerging creator, are you seeing the return on investment if youre spending that money? He says the BandLab partnership will be the first time a broad swath of musicians will be able to experiment with immersive audio. Initially, users will have access to a free set of curated, spatial-enabled beats onto which theyll be able to add vocals, instruments, and other production elements, with the final song being sa BandLab cofounder and CEO Meng Ru Kuok says the partnership is designed to make sure BandLab users are able to compete in a music industry in which streamers have been building demand for immersive listening steadily for years. In January 2024, Apple implemented a bonus payout of up to 10% for songs that are also available in spatial audio on Apple Music. The move came as a growing number of listeners opted for the immersive versions of songs on the streaming platform. Last summer, Apple VP of Apple Music and Beats told Wallpaper that 90% of Apple Music users were listening to songs with spatial audio. Though Apples spatial experience is powered by Dolby Atmos, Amazon music currently support Sonys 360 Virtual Audio. (Tidal removed its support for Sony’s 360 Virtual Audio summer.) From the consumption and listening side, theres been massive progress, but creation and music has always laggedlargely because of the infrastructure of people needing desktop equipment, expensive audio interfaces, expensive mixing gear, and those kinds of things, Kuok says. We dont want our creators to be left behind. We see in Sony a partner that is technologically able to make it accessible for people just through a pair of headphones. Equipping smartphone creatives for the future The spatial audio tools are just the start of multiyear partnership between Sony and BandLab. Freed says Sonys work with BandLab is part of his divisions broader efforts to engage with emerging artists and creators. The company works closely with the Recording Academy on its Grammy U program, which supports up-and-coming music professionals via events and networking opportunities. Additionally, in March, Sony and New York University announced the creation of the Sony Audio Institute, which over the next 10 years will offer students in the schools Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development access to Sony tech and research opportunities. It was important for us to have a fully rounded-out effortfrom the Grammy folks to the 100 millionplus BandLab users, most of whom are under 25 years old and creating with smartphones, Freed says. BandLab is seeing its fastest user growth in Nigeria and South Africa, as well as Latin America, all areas where smartphones are the dominant tech among creators. Freed says the partnership could expand to include creator camps and other educational opportunities with BandLab users to train them on Sony technology or connect them with industry professionals. This is not something that we look at and ask what the business impact is for the next quarter, Freed says. You do something like this because you really care deeply about community and growing a creator base to bring everyone together and shape where things are going for what it means to be a music creatorbecause its changing.
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E-Commerce
Floor tiles designed to block cellphone signals. Special window film to ruin the photos of overhead drones. A bevy of hidden electronic jamming devices. This might sound like the arsenal of a high-tech spy, but its actually just a few of the trappings required to keep a conclave secret in 2025. In the wake of Pope Franciss death and funeral this weekend, the Catholic Church is now in a high-stakes race to prepare for the papal conclave, the traditional ceremony that will determine the next pope. On May 7, around 135 Roman Catholic cardinals will be sequestered in the Sistine Chapel for a series of ballot votes to decide who will inherit leadership of the churcha process that can take anywhere from two days to several weeks. The conclave is designed to be a highly secretive process, wherein the outside world is entirely ignorant to the discussions happening inside the Sistine Chapel, and the cardinals themselves likewise have no connection to the outside world. However, with all of the technology available in 2025 (like drones, AI, and advanced microphones), maintaining that secrecy is much more difficult than it was in 2005, when cellphones were first banned. It doesnt help that thousands of conclave followers are turning the event into a gambling opportunity, betting their hard-earned cash on the events outcome and making the public even more ravenous for a glimpse inside the chapel walls. To prepare for this highly publicized event, the Vatican is currently in the process of a design overhaul of the Sistine Chapel to host its temporary residentsand to keep information tightly contained. View of the Vatican City and Rome from the dome of St. Peter’s Basilica. [Photo: Grzegorz Galazka/Archivio Grzegorz Galazka/Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images] Jamming devices, armed guards, and high-tech floor tiles Right now, much of what we know about the Vaticans conclave security measures comes from reports on the last conclave back in 2013. That year, fears surrounding potential leaks through hidden devices or internet signal were a serious concern, especially after an unfortunate incident in 2005 when a German cardinal reportedly accidently leaked the conclaves papal choice before the official announcement. To prevent any similar oversights in 2013, the Vatican disabled its internet signal by using jamming devices that prevented messages from any device transmitting information in or out of the chapels walls. There was a rumor that the jamming devices were placed in the floorboards, which was ultimately dispelled by the Reverend Thomas Rosica. They won’t work if you put them there, Rosica told reporters. Instead, he said, the jamming devices were installed high up on the walls, like a shield on an airplane. At the time, veteran Vatican journalist Andrea Tornielli, who is currently the editorial director of the Holy See publication Vatican News, reported that the Vaticans anti-bugging technology took the form of a Faraday cage inside the Sistine Chapel, the Santa Marta residence, and Synod Hall, where pre-conclave meetings took place. A Faraday cage is a kind of enclosure that prevents the transmission of electromagnetic waves by surrounding a targeted area with an electrically conducting material. Further security measures at the last conclave included privacy film on all windows to prevent any drone photography, rigorous checks for hidden devices inside the chapel and on the cardinals themselves, and an elite force of guards armed with heavy weapons. This time around, information on the Vaticans security plans is not yet widely available. However, there is one detail thats already emerged. According to an interview with NPR religion correspondent Jason DeRose today, The floor being installed in the Sistine Chapel right now has special cellphone-blocking technology to keep inside information in and outside information out. Fast Company has reached out to the Vatican for more information on new security measures, and will update this story accordingly. Because insight on the cardinals decision cannot be transferred to the public via the internet, they will instead use a tried-and-true method: smoke. Each day that the cardinals do not reach a decision, black smoke will issue from a chimney at the Sistine Chapel. When the choice is made, the smoke will be white. Per a report from the Associated Press, the Vatican is currently working on installing a new chimney to ensure that all of the cardinals ballots are properly burned. Meanwhile, a second chimney installed beside it will issue the ceremonial black or white smoke.
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E-Commerce
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